When Neil Armstrong took his small step for man in the lunar dust in July 1969, Americans saw it as proof there were no Earthly limits. Nothing then seemed beyond the reach of American power, prestige and know-how. It took Vietnam to expose the hubris in that sentiment.

Lee Ellis remembers it all too well — the deprivation, the torture and the constant fight against depression as days turned into years. But just over a week before he went back to Vietnam for the first time since his release in 1973, he still wasn’t sure about how he felt about it.

Architect Maya Lin's design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was, in the beginning, almost as divisive as the conflict whose casualties it was to honor.

Vietnam veteran Jim Webb, who would later become Secretary of the Navy and then a U.S. senator, said in a 1983 Stars and Stripes interview that it reminded many veterans of the peace sign flashed by antiwar protesters. "A lot of veterans," he said, "call it 'Jane Fonda's Wall.'"

John McCain, a former prisoner of war who would also serve in the Senate and be chosen as the 2008 Republican nominee for president, was also skeptical at first. But he, like many others, eventually saw what Lin was trying to accomplish.

"My first impressions of the Wall, honestly, were that it was too funereal," McCain said in a 2008 interview. "In other words, it was too bleak.

"And then one morning, I went (to the Wall), and I saw two guys standing there, Viet vets, and one of them said 'where were you?' And he said 'I was at Chu Lai.' And (the other) said 'I was at Chu Lai.' 'Really?' And within about two minutes they were embracing and crying. That convinced me that the Vietnam war memorial was everything that we had hoped it would be ... a place of reconciliation."

It is still a place of reconciliation, as well of healing, remembering and, in the case of younger visitors, learning about the war that cost over 57,000 American lives.